


Noirance

by Island_of_Reil



Category: Doctrine of Labyrinths - Sarah Monette
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Flowers, Ghosts, M/M, Magic, Memories, Offerings, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-25
Updated: 2018-03-25
Packaged: 2019-04-06 18:06:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14062455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Island_of_Reil/pseuds/Island_of_Reil
Summary: Vincent still sees ghosts.





	Noirance

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to both [Airo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/airo) and [Aansero](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aansero) for reading this over for me.

The Mirador glints and glimmers with ghosts.

The walls of the Shining Tiger glimmered too, embedded with the shards of broken lives. The Unicorn’s Mirror, only somewhat less so. But even though the buildings have stood for several hundred years, the Unicorn’s Mirror was established when I was still in leading-strings, the Shining Tiger perhaps a few decades earlier. The Mirador, its foundation stones laid down in the days of the Thestonarii and with as many forgotten corridors as the Lower City has named streets, is soaked in history: from the Crown of Nails down into water-warped levels that have never been mapped, and from Ivory to Horn Gate and round again.

And soaked in what Felix described as _noirance_ : the magic of things that are tangled and lost and dark. Soaked, too, in _mikkary_ , the curdled, seething remnants of noirant magic. Or, as Felix put it, the hatred of the memory of being human.

I told Felix I don’t care to understand much more than that, but my mind has perversely fixed itself upon these notions. I now perceive the entire Mirador thrumming with noirance like the air just before a powerful thunderstorm, mikkary dripping like condensation from every other wall and lintel. I have not descended to the subterranean levels since Felix and his brother were cast out of the Protectorate, and I do not expect I ever will again. I picture the mikkary eddying in those chambers and halls, rising up to the vaulted ceilings of ballrooms that have stood vacant for centuries — but for the ghosts. They glide along in those black, festering waters like the eyeless fish that, say the natural philosophers, live in the most remote depths of the Kelephanian Ocean. Amaryllis Cordelia, Grendille Moran, at one time Magnus Cordelius. Gideon Thraxios now, too.

On the blank wall of Mehitabel’s sitting room, I often still see the light and shadows shift and flicker until the outline emerges of that poor girl forsaken by Damian Teverius. I wish I’d thought to ask Felix to ask his brother for her name. Time and again I tell her that the living woman in these rooms is not her triumphant rival, and I think I have her convinced, until the next time. I tell myself heavy-heartedly that she can’t remember my words for the same reason she can’t harm Mehitabel: because there’s not enough left of her.

I attend court daily. Though my nails are now short and unadorned, the wizards and most of the annemer lords will always see me as the jumped-up catamite of Ivo Polydorius. But I’ve been called worse, and their dismissal serves me well in my role as Mehitabel’s supplementary eyes and ears. I listen to the unspoken words between the lines of speeches, watch for the tell-tale tics in stony faces, and feign attention to droning bores with one ear cocked toward other conversations. And, occasionally, my nose twitches to the faintest whiff of roasted meat. I make very sure I never stand anywhere near the newer tiles of the mosaic, on the spot where Brinvillier Strych — Malkar Gennadion — burnt Jane Teveria alive.

The various Antechambers are home to a dozen ghosts all told. One is a man whose coat and trousers were last in fashion when I was new to the Shining Tiger; for this reason I avoid the Puce Antechamber as much as possible. The rest are older, far older. I don’t know all the clothing styles but at least two of them are in Cordelian garb, four Ophidian, and one in the long, belted robes of the ancient Thestonarians. The Cordelians are men who shout at one another, waving their tattooed hands about vehemently, their quarrel as unsettled as it was when it began perhaps three hundred years ago. The sole Thestonarian is a small-built woman who could pass for a child but for the lines around her enormous eyes and the very adult fatigue within them. Those eyes catch mine now and again, in between flickering over the living occupants of the Cerise Antechamber, with a wry resignation: _What did I do to merit eternal unrest amid such a feckless lot?_ Once, in reply, I made her smile by telling her that if I could I’d bring her a glass of wine. And then she was gone again.

With the sole exception of that woman, I do not enjoy seeing or interacting with the ghosts of the dead. They are, however, more tolerable than the ghosts of the living.

The first time in Shannon’s sitting room that he took my hand, fixed me with his Monspulchran blue gaze and made me forget I’d ever wished to cut off my sex and hide from the world, it were as if Felix had suddenly materialized between us. I could hear him saying, _Really, darling,_ in precisely Gennadion’s tones, and it didn’t matter whether he were implicitly asking me, _can’t you do any better than my leavings?_ or asking Shannon, _another Pharoahlight whore?_

“What’s wrong?” Shannon asked, golden brows suddenly high.

“I — nothing,” I lied. What was I to say, that I was suffering an attack of maidenly nerves? I smiled my best whore’s smile at him, and he forgot his concern and drowned me in his own smile. For the next hour it was just us two, salt and sweat and heat. But as our skins cooled in his bedchamber I could feel Felix’s eerie skew-eyed gaze on us again, and a bitterness about us like the one that emanates from Mehitabel’s sitting room wall. Whom did he resent more: the lover he’d struck and spurned, or the tarquin who would not be tarquined?

His shade stretches even longer and darker between me and the Lord Protector. I cannot fault Stephen for incivility to me; he may be blunt but he is neither petty nor lacking in self-control, and I am, after all, his mistress’s trusted secretary. But I doubt he will ever greet me without that flicker of revulsion in his eyes, there and gone like a ripple of mikkary that never resolves into the form of a ghost. It is, I tell myself, only that he will never welcome the sight of any man on his brother’s arm, let alone a prostitute, and especially not Ivo’s prostitute. Still, I cannot shake the uncanny conviction that he recoils from my having brought the ghosts of the Lower City back into the Mirador, long after he thought they’d been banished to Corambis.

Only between me and Mehitabel is Felix’s memory a softer one. As I sit with pen in hand, she drifts back and forth between brisk dictation, political connivance, racy tales, and fond reminiscences. I once thought that no one who is still alive could ever know Felix as I came to know him: no education, no protector, no prospects once he aged out of the brothels, only a fearsome power he could barely control that might have someday dragged him to the stake. Yet facets of him emerge from Mehitabel’s words that, I think, he never would have permitted me to see; he would never have wanted her in his bed, after all. Her acting prowess isn’t the reason she can infuse the phrase “That fucking asshole” with a sun-drenched warmth, though not without a faint shadow of wistfulness.

I vacillate between a panicked need to cast off his presence and a yearning to honor the good in him that Gennadion didn’t kill. And, as the days lengthen and warm again, so does the idea grow and take shape. I’m only an annemer; I can’t lay ghosts to rest. But, perhaps, I can propitiate them. Surely they can’t be harder to appease than men. Not even this ghost.

On St. Vivien’s day I take a fiacre down to the north end of Havelock, the far opposite point of the district from the small, shabby house I grew up in. The neighborhood is fashionable, respectable, though not so respectable that my presence here would cause consternation were I recognized by a former client. I pay the driver an extra demigorgon to wait. One block down Rue Courante, an old woman is selling flowers. I buy from her a bouquet of trumps, broad and brilliant, banners heralding the arrival of summer.

In Havelock, the Sim runs almost completely belowground. It floods the vaults of nearby St. Kirban’s church, and further south it cools the corpses in the Dead Gallery. No more than ten feet of the river sees daylight south of Nill and north of Simside, and it’s in this neighborhood, yet another block down Rue Courante.

I step onto the little Cordelian-era bridge. The Sim reeks, as it always does, of hot metal and an anger that seems to emanate from the depths of the earth. I think about the stories I heard long ago about Felix’s keeper — never from Felix himself; from other people who knew the man when Felix was his property. I think, too, about one of Mehitabel’s stories that she got from Felix’s brother: a water-maze in the Sim, far below the floors full of ghosts, dedicated to a nearly forgotten goddess of the dead. Nobody who has seen that water-maze, it occurs to me, is alive and in Mélusine or able to return.

I untie my bouquet. I’ve kept my right thumbnail blade-sharp for opening letters to Mehitabel, and with that nail I draw a slit down the stem of the first trump, just beneath the blossom. Then I pass the stem of the second one all the way through the slit up to its own blossom, and I open up its stem in turn to accommodate the third. I haven’t made flower-crowns since before Father died, but my fingers remember what my mind has forgotten.

“I brought you flowers, Felix,” I say, adding flower to flower until the bloom of the first is tight against that of the last. “Trumps. I don’t know if they grow where you are now. Maybe it’s too far north.” I set one foot on the bottom rail and boost myself up a few inches. “I hope you like them.” And I fling the flower-crown into the water.

For a moment it simply floats along, brightness on black, before the Sim water begins to soak through the petals and dim their colors. Around it I can see patterns forming on the river’s surface, as if on a wall of the Mirador. They shift and reshape like bubbles in lather. Then, even faster than the flowers are carried underground, the patterns are gone. I see nothing below me but my own reflection in the glassy black water.

“I hope you like them,” I say again, more softly this time, as something inchoate shifts and reshapes in my breast as well. I turn away from the river, toward the early-afternoon sun, and walk back up Rue Courante toward the fiacre.


End file.
